Change job if you can looking for smarter colleagues and/or just reflect what are your priorities: you do not need to carry all the responsibility in your shoulders. You have room to give more time to your health, for example, and still be a good contribution to the team. You do not need to do it all.
For what you say this change will not come natural to you and you will need some discipline. Just start and see how it feels.
Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
171–180 of 519 posts
Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
I looked at it early on, right when I was starting out. That was a little before the dotcom crash, enough that only the really smart people were starting to think it was coming. Everything there looked amazing, and everyone I knew there was miserable every day, and I couldn't spend all my time in the Castro. So I took a powder and ended up in Baltimore. I wasn't sure I'd made the right call till a few years later, wh…
Who's gratifying his ego now?
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Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
#173Clearly you should change jobs to a place with more devs, hopefully you will find some peers there. Don't be frustrated with slower people. Part of it is the cannibalization effect. If a team has a dominant striker, some of the others will be scoring fewer goals than their potential. You might actually be doing them a favor by moving on. The other thing to remember is that great players still need water carriers, or…
Cannibalization effect. You are probably right.
I think one of the things I need to do more of is listen more, talk less.
Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
#174Well, how much do you make? Compare your comp with the numbers on levels.fyi to see if you fit in the expected band.
Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
#175Take a sabbatical, give your team the opportunity to work without you. You might be surprised to see them step up.
Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
#176Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
#177"10 x" is too linkbaity for an HN title so, in keeping with the site guidelines (no link, sorry - I'm on my phone) I've replaced it with one of the OP's other self-descriptions. (Considering how linkbaity it was, the thread is surprisingly good. I guess sometimes people do read the article?)
Thanks. I dislike the term as well, I like your edited title much more.
Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
#178Remember a 10x developer means 10 times better than the worst. Which makes you a 2x developer compared to the average.
You've reached the top at your company. You work harder and care more than most. But you haven't reached senior dev status until you realize your extra work and spotlight puts a target on your back. You are a natural target now: management shifts, technology changes, projects fail and the same people patting you on the back in management will be blaming you when things go wrong. You won't be in the room either. You are one political issue away from doom.
Some developers around you see you as smarter and will lean in for advice. Help them because another group exists who dislike your pace and how it reflects badly on them and are hoping to see you fail. Try to keep the first group large and the second group smaller.
But what are you doing this for? You would make more friends by being a friend and doing less under your name and more under others. You have the extra time you spend on your tickets but can you take the ego hit and give credit to others. If everyone is praising you, you really should use that moment to praise others. You need to include others into your moment because it becomes other people's moment too.
Use your 10x power wisely.
Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
#179If you are the smartest person in the room and you do not like it, change room
Re: Tell HN: The loneliness of a pretty good developer
#180How did you become a more productive developer?
I can go really deep talking about this, so I will just write my personal system pointers that I keep by my desk. Iterate fast > perfect Write it down to relieve cognitive load. Uni-task (focus on one thing at a time) Prioritize and execute. Solve problems by: a. Invert - improve by subtraction b. Decision trees - compare outcomes, reduce load There are two types of decisions. Hard choice (A vs B), or multiple factor…
n terms of actual code reminders I try to make it work, make it right, make it fast.
I also try to do always, then inhibit, then ignore cases that don't apply.
Minimize if statements to have consistent execution.
If a function is called from one place I will inline it. From multiple places I will try to see if I can have it happen in one place so I can inline it (plus it's an optimization thing). For complex calculations if I can't have it happen once I will try to cache it, but cache invalidation can get tricky, so I always opt for do it once.
Finally I try to write pure functions, look at parameters and return one or more computed value.
What programming languages are we talking about here?